Do you like your denim hard or soft?
New jeans recon, advanced layering maneuvers, waxed-cotton head-to-toe, and more
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When the calendar tells me it’s officially fall, but the weather’s still too warm for fully layered fits — way too balmy to even think of attempting a quadruple cuff stack — I (Erin) reach for a waxed-cotton duster. In the Bay Area, an unlined waxed jacket is a 3-season piece: You can wear it over a t-shirt or button-up when it’s still warmish, and the generous cut lets you pile beefy knits underneath come cold, wet winter.
My go-to is a roomy khaki Rachel Comey coat I bought a few years back, with an exaggerated collar that I can fold around my face like a privacy screen. The waxed fabric strikes me as a kind of alternative leather: hard-wearing, water-repellent, sometimes tough, sometimes pliant, and it only looks better the more you cook it.
Here at Spyplane HQ we’ve got wax coming out of our ears right now. Jonah just saluted some world-class waxed-cotton pieces on Thursday, and you could call me Madame Tussaud the way I’m about to curate some waxy wonders — I’m talking coats, skirts, pullovers, and bags — of my own!
Case in point, just the other day Comey released a new, shorter cousin to my coat with a comparably dramatic collar — big, blocky and belt-cinched, so you can secure it on some literal battening-down-the-hatches sh*t. (Of a piece with the metal hardware fasteners I wrote about earlier this year.)
But the best new duster I’ve seen comes from a small, made-in-California line: